For some time now, Barack Obama and his apologists have trumpeted slowing healthcare costs as somehow…

Sticker Shock: Healthcare Spending Spikes As ObamaCare Takes Effect

For some time now, Barack Obama and his apologists have trumpeted slowing healthcare costs as somehow attributable to ObamaCare. Never mind that the declines predated Obama's election, and that even The Washington Post gave him three Pinocchios in its Fact Checker analysis of this claim on November 5 of last year:

Healthcare inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in healthcare costs in 50 years - which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program."

To illustrate how he played the role of rooster taking credit for the sunrise, healthcare cost inflation reached 7% in 2003, but plummeted to approximately 2% before Obama even took office.…[more]

The political right is right about vote fraud. The left has left all decency in the rearview mirror.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, among others, under the aegis of the American Civil Rights Union, will launch a new campaign on March 22 called “ProtectYourVote.us” to “prevent election fraud by requiring a photo ID to vote in person.” They do so in the face of unprecedented actions by the Justice Department that will directly (and probably deliberately) help vote fraud, in the face of a concerted leftist campaign (including implicit union thuggery) against honorable private efforts to block vote fraud – and in the face of an NAACP appeal to Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China (!!!!) to pronounce voter-ID laws a violation of human rights.

Yes, you read that right. The NAACP is taking its case against photo IDs to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which includes not just egregiously repressive regimes such as the Saudis, Cubans and Chinese, but also such moral exemplars and fair-voting stalwarts as Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Russia and Uganda. This is sort of like asking Bonnie and Clyde to pronounce judgment against bank robbers.

As Troy Senik described here at CFIF last week, the horribly politicized (and racialized) Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has intervened in both South Carolina and Texas to block voter-ID laws in those states. The department’s actions invoke bogus statistics and fly directly in the face of a Supreme Court decision allowing Indiana to require photo identification for voting.

In that decision, written not by a conservative but by liberal stalwart John Paul Stevens, the court noted that “flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists.” And as journalist John Fund’s book Stealing Elections has made clear – and as ample evidence of vote fraud by affiliates of the controversial organization ACORN has confirmed – such fraud remains a serious, possibly growing problem.

“I am always suspicious of the motives of those people who object to preserving the integrity of the ballot box,” said Meese in an interview with me the day before the launch of ProtectYourVote.us. “In practice there is no evidence that [a photo-ID requirement] does suppress the vote of any group of people; and all these laws make ample provision for ways in which people can obtain photo IDs in case they don't already have one. In light of all this, the action of the administration is very surprising.”

The administration and its Democratic and union allies are not merely misusing the force of law to clear the way for vote fraud. They also are conducting an unprecedented media offensive against those who work to protect ballot integrity, especially a courageous Texas group called True the Vote. Democratic Party subsidiary MSNBC, in a supposedly “straight news” segment, recently slimed True the Vote by reporting (as if fact, not opinion) that the group’s activities show that “the right to vote once again is under siege.”

And as I noted here last year, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz warned that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”

But, unlike the New Black Panther members so infamously protected by Eric Holder’s minions, neither True the Vote nor any other anti-fraud group has shown the slightest sign of using physical intimidation or threats to enforce voter-integrity laws. Last week, however, union leaders announced they would put real muscle into efforts to intimidate conservative volunteers. They pledged an “army of 400,000” to fight against True the Vote. “We will not be deterred,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “If necessary we will be arrested, if that's what it takes, to register voters - if that's what it takes to protect democracy. We will match the tea party disrupters at the polling places….”

Union leaders also pledged to engage in “intensive, deep, one-on-one conversations between the 400,000 unionists going out there and voters, in their workplaces and at their doors.”

Ordinary conversations, of course, aren’t usually a problem. But when unions have a long history of thuggery, “intensive, deep, one-on-one conversations” can assume a decidedly threatening guise.

All of which is good reason for the American Civil Rights Union to launch ProtectYourVote.us. In a close election, it is important that the leader of the free world not be seated due to phantom votes in the names of people who have died or moved, or who aren’t even citizens. Protecting against vote fraud should not be a matter of partisanship, but of good citizenship.

Which one of the following Obama Administration officials stated in April 2015 that under the nuclear deal with Iran, “you will have anywhere, any time 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has”?

"[Trump's] rise is not due to his supporters' anger at government. It is a gesture of contempt for government, for the men and women in Congress, the White House, the agencies. It is precisely because people have lost their awe for the presidency that they imagine Mr. Trump as a viable president. ...Mr. Trump's supporters like that he doesn't in the least fear the press, doesn't get the dart-eyed,…[more]

—Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

— Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

Liberty Poll

On August 6, Fox News will televise two debates with the Republican presidential candidates, at 9 p.m. with the top 10, and at 5 p.m. with the rest of the field. Do you plan on watching one or both?